


Blood Dusk

by MrProphet



Category: Northwest Smith - C. L. Moore
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-04-22
Packaged: 2018-10-22 15:57:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,804
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10700280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MrProphet/pseuds/MrProphet





	Blood Dusk

There are parts of the great, rust-red Martian desert where even the hardiest nomad will not go. Places where ancient powers lurk, baffling even the navigational equipment which charted the paths between the three planets. In such places, the mind of mortal man was mazed and the senses twisted. Other things than men dwelt there; older and more terrible creatures that survived long past their time amid the dust storms and shimmering mirages. The drylanders never went there and the swamp-raised Venusians avoided every desert if ever they could. Only a handful of the most daring, most foolhardy Earthmen ever dared the trackless wastes, and those who returned invariably came back... changed.

The largest of these places, the most impenetrable and the one with the darkest reputation was that which was once known to the men of Earth as Elysium Planitia, but which the dryland natives of the red world named Shaeshalakk Atu; the Place of Parched Souls. The sulphurous fumes which boiled from the volcanic vents, blindingly thick, choking and toxic, were horror enough, even without the tales of ancient, monstrous intelligences, but they were at least a horror which Northwest Smith could hold secure in his strong, practical mind. His had not been a life which would allow a man to grow sceptical – travelling from world to world for at least as long as he had been able to walk on any of their surfaces, he had seen too much to think that the narrow science of modern Earth could encompass all the solar system had to offer. Yet neither would he allow himself to be such a craven creature as leaped at shadows and shrank from the merest hint of the unknown. Such a creature as his drylander guide, Chokkan, who halted at the first brimstone whiff from the plain ahead.

“We must go back, Smith,” Chokkan insisted in his harsh, Martian voice. “This place ahead is bad; there is terrible strength there. None survive so much as a night upon the plain.”

Northwest Smith had heard such talk before. Many Martians spoke of strength as a quality which, while it could be possessed by a body in many ways, was something much more than of the body. Chokkan spoke of strength and might mean something akin to power, something akin to magic, or something akin to a soul. In truth, he might not know what he meant, and be merely repeating words passed down to him by generations of his dryland forebears. They had feared the plain with good reason, with its killing air, but that was then and this was now.

“A little sulphur won't hurt us,” Smith drawled as he pulled on his respirator. He held out a similar device to Chokkan, but the Martian shrank back from it as though it were poison. “Take it,” Smith insisted.

“Terrible strength out there,” Chokkan repeated.

"Terrible strength, and Cyan,” Smith growled. “And I don't plan on letting the one keep me from the other.”

Cyan. The most wanted man in the solar system. For years nothing more than a legend; a name used to scare other mobsters into line, but a name not invoked without risk. There were two types of men who spoke the name of Cyan: those who served him, and those who would soon be among the dead. As for those who dared to hunt the elusive Cyan; they came to envy the impostors who hung, crucified or quartered or otherwise mutilated on the walls of every criminal slum on a dozen worlds.

All save Northwest Smith and his partner, the Venusian Yarol. They had set out to capture Cyan, partly for the reward, which was vast, but also out of a sense of duty to their own reputation. They were not precisely bounty hunters, although they had hunted men for bounty, and they were most assuredly not law-abiding men, but they had a reputation as hard men; men it was unwise to cross; men who could achieve the impossible. It was, in the end, unthinkable for such men to permit a rival such as Cyan to remain at liberty.

For two years they had tracked the archcriminal's affairs between the three worlds and to planets far more distant. Many were the assassins they had dispatched to a well-deserved grave as Cyan became aware of them; many also were the friends, or as close as such men came to the type, that they had buried in the quest. Yet never had they wavered from their goal; had they been the sort of men to give up the pursuit in the face of adversity, then they would not have been the men to ever have begun it.

And at last their persistence had been rewarded, in a grand casino in the capital of Earth-colonised Mars, when they had finally set eyes on Cyan. The galaxy would have lost its greatest criminal there and then, but for all their months of pursuit and years of experience, Northwest Smith and Yarol were nonetheless caught unawares to find their quarry no hardened drylander, but a golden, Venusian girl, lovely as a vision, with the face of an angel and the eyes of a demoness.

The two men were not given to sentiment, and to suggest that the golden girl's beauty had unmanned them would be to do a disservice to their reputation. It was mere surprise that gave them pause; at her beauty, at her youth, at the seraphic innocence of her smile. But for that they would have taken her there and then, instead of losing her in the midsts of a pitched gun battle, slaying three of her bodyguards as she made her escape.

From there it was a straight pursuit. Exposed and defeated, Cyan's mystique collapsed and with it her power. Now she was but a lone girl, ruthless and deadly, but ranged against two men whose hearts were as hard and whose skills as great. Smith had rarely tracked so elusive a quarry, but once she was out of the shadows he had never doubted that he would run her to ground in the end. 

Yet, for all he recognised her cunning, he reckoned without the golden girl's daring. Not a man on the three planets would have had the courage to do what she did; to walk up to her enemies in the public bar, as bold as brass, with a gun in her hand. It was a move so absurdly reckless that it had almost paid off. Against any lesser hunters it would have worked entirely and secured Cyan's return to power with its audacity. As it was, she came closer than any of the gunmen of Mars or Venus had ever done, her ray-blast raking Yarol's arm before either man was fully aware of her. That was the only chance she got, however, and once more she was forced to flee, Smith's answering blasts leaving a scorched trace across her milk-white shoulder.

She was injured now; a wounded animal, more dangerous than ever, and Yarol was laid up in bed in Lankkhama; would be for weeks. That was why Smith tracked Cyan alone, even into the Shaeshalakk Atu itself. To give up the chase would be to give the whip hand back to Cyan, and it would surely spell his death.

“Go back if you're scared,” he drawled, “but don't expect to get paid.”

“What good is money that you can never spend?” Chokkan demanded, and he fled back towards the town without a word of argument. He must truly have been terrified to leave behind the sum that Smith had offered; more money than most rural drylanders would see in a year or more.

Alone then, Smith set out across the plain. The vapour clouds swirled around him, until he could barely see a yard ahead of him, yet even through that blinding haze he felt that he was watched. Some dark intelligence pressed against his awareness, as though the plain itself noted his passage with ageless, patient malice. Smith kept his hand on the butt of his heat blaster, but nothing that he saw had shape enough to fear such a weapon.

As the sun sank in a blood-red haze, Smith sought shelter for the night; some place where the vapour clouds were not so thick and he could rest with a wall at his back. The plain was studded with volcanic stacks and he found his shelter at the base of one of these, in a shallow cave dug into the basalt by some long-ago dust storm; smoothed and shaped by the forgotten tribesman who had sculpted a demonic likeness above the entrance.

Red light washed over the red sand as Smith dug into his shelter. He took off his respirator for long enough to take a slug of burning segir-whisky, but the sulphur stench in his nose deadened the taste of the liquor. 

It was out of the bloody glow of sunset that he saw the form emerge, dark and solid among the shifting clouds. The blaster was in his hand even before he recognised Cyan; blistered and caked in dust, but still tall and proud.

She held her blaster loosely in her hand and Smith took no chances. His let loose a blistering, blue-white ray of heat which cut into her right arm. The weapon fell from her now-useless hand and Cyan turned her black eyes on him; once sharp and lethally seductive, they were now flat and dead as pools of black ice.

She took a step backward.

“Don't be a damned fool,” Smith growled. “Nothing to be done now but give yourself up.”

Cyan spat viciously, then vanished back into the clouds. Smith could not summon the will to go after her. The light grew more and more like the colour of blood as it faded and the sense of an obscene intelligence grew with the shadows.

He slept fitfully that night, his sleep disturbed by whistling winds and the fear of Cyan. He woke fully once, close to midnight, when a piercing scream ripped across the plain. In the morning he looked about him and saw that the sand outside his shelter was criss-crossed with deep furrows, as though something had been dragged across the ground, over and again, looking for something.

Looking for him.

Smith touched the demonic visage that had watched over him all night and felt a tremor in the stone. He turned his back on the plain and walked fast until he was out of the clouds. Cyan could stay there, would stay there forever. He had no doubt that it had been her death scream he had heard , and he had no intention of feeding the terrible strength that had accounted for the most wanted woman in the solar system.


End file.
